Shareholder campaigns against Nabors’ board

In the annals of excessive executive pay, few stories standout like that of Nabors Industries. The consistently exorbitant rewards bestowed on CEO Eugene Isenberg have earned him a perennial spot atop the list of Houston’s highest paid executives.

In 2008, for example, Isenberg grabbed a 73 percent raise – to $59.8 million, almost all of it in cash — while his shareholders got pounded for the third straight year, with their returns falling 56 percent. The all-cash payout helped insure that Isenberg remained immune to his investors’ pain.

No wonder, then, that the AFSCME Employees Pension Plan, which owns Nabors’ shares, is calling for investors to withhold votes for two members of Nabors’ compensation committee at the company’s annual meeting next week. The AFL-CIO-affiliated fund is also urging support for a shareholder proposal that would strip Isenberg of the chairman’s title and make it a non-executive board position.